As Catamaran executive John Romza kicked off the wearable technology panel he moderated Wednesday morning, he highlighted the extent to which smart devices have comandeered his life.

Romza, executive vice president of research and innovation at the pharmacy benefit management firm, wore a smart watch and a Fitbit fitness bracelet, a smart phone, an RFID badge, and carried a laptop, a hotspot and a mobile tablet. He slid a Google Glass eyepiece over his spectacles.

“And now I see it’s 8:04, so I’m a minute over where my presentation was supposed to be,” he said to laughter from the audience at The Executives’ Club of Chicago.

It was a friendly crowd. By show of hands, a third of them were wearing personal health monitors. Almost all were wirelessly connected.

In an hour-long conversation that blended genuine gee-whiz moments with a fleet of “Star Trek” references, the panel spoke to the advances in miniaturization, battery life and wireless communication that have let wearable technology interweave into everyday life.

Starting with Google Glass in 2012, more recent health-monitoring wristbands, and dozens of new gadgets each month, wearable devices have been pervasively collecting data, interacting with one another and proposing more effective ways to do anything from burn calories to hunt down bargains.

Pervasive they are, lending smarts to glasses, enabling thumb-ring users to tap and send messages in mid-air, empowering fake fingernails to unlock doors with a snap and using heartbeats and a sensor to charge pacemakers.

Healthcare applications were the focus — and sometimes the consternation — of Wednesday morning’s panel.

The speakers included Mark Bogart, EVP of Sales at LifeWatch ambulatory health monitoring; Dr. Ying-Cheng Lo, VP of Innovation and Technology Development for Medical Products at Baxter; Ken Douros, Director of User-Centered Innovation for Motorola Solutions; and Addison McGuffin, VP of Business Technology Innovation at Health Care Service Corp.

“Some of the things we’re looking at is a trend toward technology that is helping patients toward health performance and improvement on a daily basis,” McGuffin said. “It’s not ‘How am I feeling right now?’ It’s ‘How am I going to feel tomorrow?’ How do we capture that content?”

Medical uses for wearable tech include monitoring, self-diagnosis, ambulatory care and real-time integrated data. But wearable medical devices also face regulatory hurdles at the FDA and the FCC — they’re medical devices after all, and the cloud computing required by many applications presents other problems. Think hackable pacemakers. And device makers prefer the shorter go-to-market returns of consumer products to the regulatory hassle of medical devices.

“Adoption isn’t the biggest challenge,” Bogart said of wearable smart medical devices. “Who’s going to be responsible for the data? Is the consumer going to use this for self-diagnosis? If the patient gives the information to the doctor, there’s associated liability.”

Still, the trend affects and entices developers, consumer electronics, wireless providers, regulatory bodies, law enforcement and mobile marketing agencies. Industry analysis by firms such as Transparency Market Research indicate wearable tech is a potential $1 billion worldwide market in 2014, with healthcare and medical uses comprising $500 million of it.

The healthcare and pharmaceutical executives in the room loved the implications. It remains to be seen how sentimentally consumers with privacy concerns embrace a fully connected future.

Trends in corporate economics and technological development point clearly toward more widespread adoption, however.

There’s unstoppable evolution in cognitive computing that overlays artificial intelligence, devices talking to each other and improved capabilities for assisted decision-making. It’s useful; most of the connected world is using it already.

“Devices are making decisions based on a set of variables you might not even be aware of,” McGuffin said. “It’s kind of spooky. I also think it’s kind of exciting. We’ve always created tools to enhance our life quality, from the wheel to the Google Glass. I think it’s going to continue to track in that direction.”